From: Adam <""4thwormcastfromthemolehill\"{at}the field.near
the bridge">

Rich wrote:
>     XML is easy.  Valid XML must declare the encoding so there is no
> ambiguity.
>

Indeed so roll on XHTML.

Adam

> Rich
>
>
>     "Adam" <""4thwormcastfromthemolehill\"{at}the
>     
field.near the bridge">
>     wrote in message news:449724d4$1{at}w3.nls.net...
>     Rich wrote:
>     >    Two different issues.  IE has to apply heuristics to file types
>     > because the servers that return this content often return bogus, both
>     > incorrect or invalid, types.  It's not easy to fix.  IE had to do this
>     > because netscape didn't enforce types and to be compatible IE couldn't
>     > either.  Because the types aren't enforced lots of servers still
>     do this
>     > wrong.  Because they do types can't be enforced.
>     >
>     >    Text and Unicode is first a false distinction.  It's all text.  In
>     > the case of Notepad, you mean UTF-16 text vs. UTF-8 text vs. ANSI text
>     > as this is the distinction that Notepad makes on load.  Even that
>     misses
>     > the complexity as what people call ANSI is actually any of 14 distinct
>     > and incompatible ANSI encodings and is often one of many OEM encodings
>     > which may be distinct from any of the ANSI ones.  It is complicated
>     > because for many of the ANSI encodings including the one used in the
>     > U.S. and Western Europe, anything could be valid.  Because of this
>     it is
>     > not always possible to make a distinction between UTF-16 and ANSI as a
>     > file could validly be either.  UTF-8 is restrictive so it is easy to
>     > tell if something is valid UTF-8.  That could still be a problem as
>     > valid UTF-8 could be valid ANSI too.  Instead some heuristics are
>     > applied.  For example if you see 0D 00 0A 00 then the file is probably
>     > UTF-16 while if you see 0D 0A it may be ANSI though U+0A0D might be a
>     > valid Unicode character.  I didn't look.
>     >
>
>     Yeah hidden chars esp in XML can be a bitch.
>
>     Especially when XML chars rendered from html streams (file or other)
>     processed from CDATA.
>
>     Roll on XHTML.
>
>     Adam

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